I just use appimages, they are even smaller than native packages many times due to their compression, for example libreoffice being 300 vs 600 MiB, librewolf 110 vs 330 MiB, etc.
I've had about 15% success rate with my attempts at AUR. I don't have the patience to figure out why things don't work, I guess. Either ended up with a flatpak, or decided it wasn't that important to me.
Yeah storage is cheap but I last reformated my boot drive in 2017 so my root partition is 20GB and now I have no room for Flatpak. Now I could just resize it but wheres the fun in that.
TL:DR "A 20GB root partition ought to be enough for anybody."
I was starting an install of Debian the other day, and it suggested 25 GB as the root partition (including /usr, but not /var, /home, or /tmp). I had to laugh. My server has a 50 GB partition for that purpose and it's around half full.
I aborted the installation. Might try again later today. (Switching this machine from Kubuntu, using a new drive, so it's not critical that it be done at a certain time.)
I have to admit, I only have the barest understanding of this flatpak, snap, docker, etc. business. I've been using Linux since the late 90s and missed this development. I haven't been following what was happening in the development end, I suppose - in part because there isn't that much need to, because Linux has gotten so good.
But while I'm a power user (hey, I used Slackware until about 2015), I've found that I much prefer not having to spend hours and hours administering my machines every few weeks or months.
Sorry for the long comment. But this has been bugging me for a long time and you triggered me. No need to try to answer my questions if you're not feeling it, I'm just dumping. You can stop reading here, if you like.
I've used a few appimages for limited cases - BalenaEtcher to burn HomeAssistant on to SD cards for my Raspberry Pi, and I think the scanning software I use is also an AppImage. The idea of having the libraries and binaries all together for certain things is a good one for certain cases, such as software I do not use regularly. BelenaEtcher strikes me as a perfect use case for appimage, because I don't want to spend time installing Balena and keeping it up to date or uninstalling it, when I'm only likely going to use it once or twice. I never even move it out of my Downloads directory, just download, run, and delete.
Ubuntu (I use Kubuntu) moved Firefox to a snap image some time back. I get it, sandboxing, not a bad idea. But I'm pretty sure I had one installed by root, and one erroneously installed by my user account, possibly caused by forgetting to "sudo" during an update one day (I'm really not sure how it happened). And that latter one, if it existed, was almost certainly sitting in my /home directory somewhere, because my user account doesn't have authority to write to /usr or /opt or anywhere like that. I didn't plan to install software in /home, and didn't allocate space for it, and don't really like the concept in general. (I've switched debs for Firefox, and think I got the snaps for it cleaned up.)
If we're going to do images installed by users, /opt seems like a much better choice, albeit with some controls - maybe /opt/username/ with permissions set by user; I'd be okay with the user account being able to install there and being unable to screw up system files. My current backup strategy involves grabbing everything in /home with a few very specific exceptions, and clearly I don't need the current release of Firefox on my backup.
I have OpenProject (community edition) installed for keeping track of a restoration project I'm working on, and I'm pretty sure I used docker to install it. I have to admit it was easy to install (but so are debs 99.9% of the time), but now I'm wondering about the best way to get the data back out so I can migrate that software to my server (it's running on my desktop because my server was that 2008 computer). I assume I can backup and restore, but I haven't yet looked into this. Or heck, maybe it's possible to just move the Docker image, the way I moved the HomeAssistant KVM image. It looks like the data is stored in a separate volume (which I interpret to mean a file that acts as a virtual disk, similar to how KVM has a virtual disk for the OS and apps in the virtual machine). Also, I'm not clear if docker images automatically update or if I should be updating them manually.
Then there's Zwift. Zwift is a virtual cycling program that runs on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. No Linux client, which isn't a surprise. I have a whole Windows 10 computer in the basement that only runs Zwift, and it's my only Windows machine that I use. But, someone created a docker image of Zwift! I tried it on my Linux desktop machine a while back, and it worked. Very cool! But Zwift updates the program regularly, introducing new bugs and features - does the maintainer of that image have to do anything? What if he or she loses interest? It'd be nice to ditch Windows, but I have no idea if that docker image will remain usable indefinitely.
I think Zwift is using Wine to run. So it seems the docker image for that has the Zwift Windows client, some Wine libraries, and everything supporting Wine is already supplied by the Kubuntu install...but I'm really not sure. Theoretically I don't need to know, until something breaks.
I have yet to use a flatpak, I think.
I've considered asking about all of this in the Linux community here on Lemmy, but there's probably an article with an overview of it somewhere, and I just need to search for it.
I’ve used a few appimages for limited cases - BalenaEtcher to burn HomeAssistant on to SD cards for my Raspberry Pi, and I think the scanning software I use is also an AppImage. The idea of having the libraries and binaries all together for certain things is a good one for certain cases
This very much, I use an appimage for gimp because I'm not fucking putting GTK2 in my system lol.
Also if steam came as an appimage with the 32bit libs and a patched glibc it would be amazing, it would save so many headaches for everybody, one can only wish though.
Also they support a portable home, so steam can be on a different partition with all the games and its own user files independent of the distro/home you are using.
Depends on what you run on the server. A lot of the VMs I use for https://dnstools.ws/ have 5GB space and they use less than 2GB of it. They don't have much installed though.
I was mistaken in my earlier comment. It's my desktop machine that has 50 gb for everything but home, and it's running very short on space. The server, which is what I thought I was thinking of, has 25 gb for / (not including /var, /tmp, or/home) and I'm using just over half of that space.
I've put steam on a librebooted chromebook with similar stats, it has to install games on a usb drive/sd card but it works quite well even for casual linux gamers
I suppose it might seem like that if you install it just for a singular app. Then the runtime + possible drivers are a hefty load. But everything after that, the weight of the deps proportional to the apps gets lighter through shared runtimes, drivers, dedupping and so on.
Some go to install a singular flatpak and are horrified by the amount it tries to install and never look back. Which I sorta get, though if that their level of familiarity with flatpak they might not be the best people to partake in the dep/flatpak/snap/appimage fights. But they still do.
Yes, the same can be said if you run GNOME and install a single KDE app or vice-versa. And here’s my petition to convert DigiKam to FLTK so everyone can enjoy it.
That's true. I even have this thing where I don't like to install KDE stuff on GNOME or GNOME stuff on KDE because I feel like the deps they pull in make my system "messier" since it now includes stuff from two DEs. It's silly but it just bothers me. With flatpak I don't feel the same, with it it keeps them neatly separated so it feels better.
Indeed, for a single app it might be a lot, considering it's a single app. But even then it's not a lot of disk space out of what people have. But with every additional app, that additional space use lessens thanks to shared runtimes and dedupping.
Also i don't know what is flapak runtimes which are big and different versions of them are required for different apps
I think a few of the most used one cover most apps, but even with different runtime versions and I think even different runtimes, thanks to dedupping it should only use extra space for stuff that's actually different between the two. Two instances of the same library in different runtimes would only use the space of one, afaik.
Yeah. The problem is when I want to install one flatpak app and it takes space.
Are thoose runtimea like a library itself? The runtime itself seems to be using more than a hundred megabytes of space. Isn't the deduplications applicable only for libraries used in different runtimes but runtimes itself uses space, right?
Runtimes are collections of common libraries. The idea is that instead of everyone having to bundle everything, they can use the same runtimes. Yes, dedupping only takes effect when you have multiples of the same library.
Well, at least with FlatPak the dependencies are likely shared, if applications are in the same ballpark.
Contrast with docker style where everything bundles their own dependencies so even if you have identical containers, you have essentially duplicate content wasting space.
I use Flatpaks mostly because I like having my base os and gui minimal as possible. Every thinking that is not core os I install as a flatpak. This is great because I didn't have to install dependencies like lib32 and other libraries on my root partition. Lean and mean.
Some are bundled, lots of the deps come from runtimes that are collections of deps. And many apps use those same runtimes. It's sorta middle point between bundling everything and sharing everything.
It’s like a separate package manager with much less granularity than most distros packages. It’s a very clever implementation that has got its pros and cons, but massive duplication of libraries isn’t one of them.
Not everyone has top notch tech, or the money to afford it. 128GB for a phone is more than enough storage space, so if the price of the 256GB model is 30 or $40 plus, I'd opt for the 128GB model as well.
